David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Besides, Leila had crossed paths with mercenaries a couple of times before, in Africa and Afghanistan. And her politics allowed for nuance; a security contractor could be fulfilling a legitimate, non-nefarious role. (In fact, she maybe owed a serious debt to a handsome Englishman in his sixties, a G4S “consultant” on her Sierra Leone job who’d sat up front with the driver; he had once talked the Suburban and all its occupants through an armed gang at a badly misjudged checkpoint. He had used his wits alone to do it, but Leila remembered his jaw muscles and the calm threat in his eyes that told the men outside the vehicle, You do this, I have a hundred colleagues who will be here in an hour. )

And yet her scavenging mind returned to the men lurking under that shade tree by the second checkpoint, to their wraparound sunglasses, to the air of menace they gave off. If it had been those two following her instead of Heckle and Jeckle, she would be truly freaked.

When she tried to plot the location of the forest checkpoint on a map, she couldn’t find the road that Aung-Hla had taken to get off the highway and up into the forest. It wasn’t on maps. And it wasn’t just her shitty tourist maps it wasn’t on; it also wasn’t on Sine maps or on any of the other mapping sites. It couldn’t be found using the expensive, proprietary satellite-mapping service she had access to through Helping Hand. She had even visited the dismal library at the university to look through their big atlases. There was just no road in a place where she could pretty much swear there had been a road. And yet she’d marked the GPS point on her running watch. What do you do when the Internet calls you a liar?

Gotta know when you’re just busting your knuckles, Leila’s father used to say. He affected chestnutty speech like that when they were all new in America and his English was poor. Leila and her brother and sister would bring slang home to him, some of which he deployed, to his children’s great delight. They taught him to use fill your pants when he meant “be scared,” and he missed the joke, had thought it had something to do with running away. He used the expression for months. Once he realized his mistake, he was more careful and would have his children’s submissions vetted by an adult American English speaker.

Leila was busting her knuckles here, surely. The heat had definitely been turned up on her lately, and she suspected that it had to do with what she’d seen in the forest. But if there was something criminal going on up near Myo Thit, it would take more than a Sine search to get to the bottom of it — some information just doesn’t leave the safe or the briefcase or whatever. She almost wished there were a way to let them know — whoever they were — that she didn’t understand what she had seen and would leave it alone if they’d leave her alone. That might be a bit like volunteering your lunch money to a bully, but she had a job to do here: getting her medical supplies out of hock and finding scholarship candidates, neither of which was easily accomplished with Heckle and Jeckle dogging her every step.

What was up that road that deserved a visit from that entourage? Gems? Teak? That was one way that generals were screwing this place and enriching themselves — by selling all that to outside interests. But the generals were in bed with the Chinese and the Russians on that; it seemed unlikely that American mercenaries would be guarding any of those schemes. And what was up with that snazzy little guard post? Its retractable antenna and tire munchers? And that strange thing the angry one had said, about the hipster in the headphones: He’s fucking tech support. He’s here to install software. What the fuck?

Maybe ten kilometers, at a good pace, would jog something loose. Plus, it was amusing to see her minders keep up with her. In town, they were pretty slick. If she tried to shake them or make them work hard, they always found a way to handle it. They’d huff over footpaths and duck into doorways and reverse down chicken-clogged streets. She made them peruse souvenirs while she did the same. This seemed to amuse the souvenir vendors, in on a joke they would never have been allowed to make.

But during her morning runs in the shaggy, scraggy riverside parks on the west side of the city, there wasn’t much to hide behind. One of the men would stay in the white car and on the nearest-to-her road that was Datsunable while the other ran behind her. It was ridiculous. It looked like there were two recreational runners in Mandalay, but one wore tan slacks and ran thirty yards behind the other.

This morning she really pushed herself. Jeckle kept the pace just fine. She stopped once to stretch, when a sudden stitch chomped at her abdomen. She made her short self tall, and then bent in half. The river before her was flat and gray. A mild pong came off its dirty banks. Jeckle had to stop also; he pretended great interest in a fence post. Leila could see Heckle in the little Datsun, a quarter mile away.

What the hell — she waved at Jeckle.

That surprised him, and she thought she could see the bind he was in; all the binds he was in, a guy like that. Take that, stooge, she thought.

But then he waved back.

There was plenty she didn’t know about her situation right now. But that these guys wouldn’t wave back — that was something she had been certain of. Jeckle had waved like he was a friend .

She turned and started back. Jeckle ceased to be intrigued by the fence post. And on the way home, Leila did run very fast, and she did indeed jog something loose. It wasn’t some genius discovery. It was just a step back, a different vantage point. All those little homilies about how you had to think new thoughts in order to solve problems — they were true. It’s just that the homilies seldom told you how to do that.

She knew some people who might know how to look into something like this, people who might even want to look into it.

She knew a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and there was a boy with whom she had been briefly, fiercely, in love who was now important at the BBC. One summer, eons ago, she ate a lot of mushrooms with a girl who now ran the news desk for a big NPR affiliate. Another time, she had answered a medical distress call from a Reuters photographer in an African capital. (After a fish soup that he’d known from sip one he should not finish but had anyway, this man staggered back to his hotel room and clung to the towel rack as his insides cascaded out of him. He would have died there in that bathroom, from swift and acute dehydration, had he not called Leila. She came like a shot, commandeered a hotel car, and sang a Leonard Cohen song to him as they sped together through the blue night to the hospital.) Her little brother’s best friend, who as an eleven-year-old had been besotted with Leila, now did forensic corporate accountancy at some very high level for big-ticket clients. She knew someone at the New York Times, an investigator at the UNHCR, and a CIA librarian. She knew a beat cop in Queens, a CDC virologist, and a speechwriter for a congressman.

So that afternoon, all of those people received this e-mail:

Hoping that one or some among you might help me figure out whether there’s anything fishy going on near this site that I kind of stumbled upon. That’s not really even a cliché—I pretty much did stumble upon it. I think one of the big security companies (could be Exigent or Spire or Bluebird?) is protecting something in the middle of the forest, where there aren’t even supposed to be any roads. The place is in northeastern Myanmar, on the Chinese border. It’s hard to say who or what you’d be looking for. Maybe any new or high-value facility or activity within about ten kilometers of a Burmese town called Ashang. Or possibly near a Chinese town called Baguanzai. A GPS point you could start with is 24°22′40″ North, 97°32′39″ East. Whoever is doing work up there, I think they’re flying in tech-support guys with bodyguards. I know, right? I said it was fishy.